The Skeptical Examiner. Tech Industry segments merge and fork in generally obscure ways. That can be driven arbitrarily by the categorization strategies that work for analyst groups like Gartner or IDC, but it’s also driven by the fact that technology buyers don’t live in categories convenient for marketers.
Among vendors’ deflection strategies in interviews is this: “You are comparing apples and oranges.” The implication: They have no competition.
No competition if the world is in neat compartments.
In the fruit section of any supermarket you will find people grabbing apples, oranges, blueberries, bananas; I’ve never seen anyone grab a cumquat. And tech buying can mirror this wanton buyer promiscuousness.
That occurs today while looking at IDC’s Market Glance that looks at the High Performance and Performance Intensive Computing sectors. The sets and subsets thereof are subjective and various … and often collide.
The cursory viewer may be surprised by the extent to which Nvidia, and IBM compete here and there. That says something about IBM’s challenges, which, obviously, come from more directions than just Nvidia.
On the Nvidia side, it tees up a question as to whether or not the chip and tools maker can support multiple efforts successfully, as it looks to break out of the gamer-crypto space, and to thrive in the new vistas of AI.
IBM’s focus on AI, which arguably seeded the wide renewed interest in the area, seems back-burner stuff for now – as it dims down the hype machine that was Watson.
Is ‘AI’ another name for high-performance computing?
I know the Nvidia/IBM angle on this IDC chart (above and below) surprised me. As one wag said: Check with your ophthalmologist before viewing it. – J.V.
.@IDC‘s Market Glance for Performance Intensive Computing. The convergence of HPC w/ AI, Big Data, Data Analytics, and Quantum Computing brings consolidation of infrastructure bringing decades of HPC’s best practices into the forefront to achieve optimal price/performance! pic.twitter.com/N6r5c0m2F6
— Matt Eastwood (@matteastwood) September 13, 2022